Problem with help() in python/ipython interpreters

[Casey]

I'm running python 2.5.2 on WinXP.  I've always used a GUI for
interactive development, but I wanted to try out ipython which better
supports matplotlib in this mode.  Unfortunately, whenever I try to
use help() I get the following error:

(Sys) The system cannot find the file specified.
 "C:\documents"

It turns out that the regular (python.exe) interpreter has the same
problem.  I have the HTML docs installed, my PYTHONDOCS environment
variable points to the HTML directory, and I actually uninstalled and
reinstalled every library I use from scratch to make sure it wasn't
some random config issue.

The error message leads me to believe that the help() function is
trying to access something in my windows user directory structure (C:
\Documents and Settings\<username>\...) and is having problems with
the embedded space.  The really strange thing is that my python
directory is rooted at c:\python25 including my html docs. I know that
ipython does by default create a profile directory in %HOME%\_ipython
but that doesn't seem to be a problem and wouldn't impact the default
python.exe interpreter.

Any ideas?